Breaking the Barrier: On Race, Gender, and Junot Díaz

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A few weeks ago, in the The New York Observer, Nina Burleighthrew down the notion that the enormous success of Junot Díaz’sThis Is How You Lose Her is undeserved. Díaz is beloved not because he is a great writer, Burleigh argues, but because Díaz is a man, and a man who delights us with tales about dashing players and their hapless women victims.

Is it the wars, the terrorism, the recession, driving the longing for a regenerated machismo that Mr. Díaz’s multi-culti cred makes acceptable again? Is it a feminist backlash?…Mr. Díaz’s wondrous bewitching of prize committees comes at a time when women writers remain wildly underrepresented in publishing, on both the reviewing and the reviewed side.

Normally, I’d be all over this kind of thing. I love talking about the lack of gender equity in publishing (in fact, I did for Bitch Magazine this summer). But I can’t agree that Díaz’s success is gender-based; because yes Díaz is a man, but he’s also a man of color. Critics who say that Díaz would not receive the same warmth, if he was a woman, are overlooking the factor of race.

The VIDA statistics that count the number of women’s bylines versus men’s in prestigious magazines are undeniable: in the last two years, in the publications surveyed, only one-quarter to one-third of bylines went to women. There is no parallel count for writers of color, (anybody want to start one?) though we can count prizes. Since 1917, a total of four men of color have won the Pulitzer: N. Scott Momaday, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward P. Jones, and Junot Díaz. Thirty women have won the Pulitzer, almost half of them condensed in the last 30 years, and three of those women were women of color. Since 1950 two men of color have won a National Book Award in Fiction (Ralph Ellison and Ha Jin), and 16 women have won an NBA, one of them a woman of color. And these numbers are reflected in MFA programs and at writing conferences. For example, I had the great fortune of attending an MFA program with close numbers of men and women, though gender parity did vary from year to year. But over the three years that I attended the program, I can count only seven men of color, and 12 women of color, probably out of about 150 students.* While no stats on gender and race exist for MFA programs, I don’t think that my program was out of the norm. Even at VONA, the annual Bay Area writing conference for writers of color — where, I should disclose, I took a workshop with Junot Díaz in 2007 — the number of women attendees outstrips the number of men. I’m not trying to say that publishing isn’t difficult for women; I’m simply trying to say that it ain’t easy for men of color either.

However. I don’t need to dazzle you with depressing numbers to make my case. I could just point out the fact that in our culture, the stereotypes associated with men of color don’t exactly make room for the kind of insight, expressiveness, and artsyness we associate with writers. Instead, these stereotypes expect men of color, particularly African American men and Latino men, to be hypermasculine and violent, and little else. They expect East Asian men, South Asian men and Arab men to be computer nerds, cab drivers, or terrorists, and not poets; Native American men are expected to be drunk.

It surprises me that only a few months after we were all wearing hoodies for Trayvon Martin, we can overlook the fact that race is a terrifyingly high obstacle for men of color. Of course, some of the greatest wordsmiths, storytellers and social historians of our time have to come to us through hip hop — like Big L, Biggie, Jay-Z or your preferred MC of choice — but thanks to the racialized wariness that often meets hip hop in the mainstream, you will rarely hear these men of color described adoringly by the arbiters of literary culture.

While I emphatically agree that gender is a barrier in publishing, taking out our sense of injustice on men of color is barking up the wrong tree. It would make more sense for us to think about how the barriers we face are parallel, and to try working on the unfairness in publishing together.

But Nina Burleigh aside, what really struck in the craw of my Twitter feed is not the fact that Junot Díaz is a man, period, but rather that he is a man who is being rewarded for writing love stories about characters who are mysteriously close to himself. The argument runs that women aren’t allowed to write about love, especially not in a confessional way — unless they want to get shelved under “Chick Lit” instead of “Prize Winners.” This holds more water for me. Still, I can think of multiple women writers who write about love and their own lives — and who gracefully demonstrate the impact of gender on their love and their lives — just as Díaz does. Like Mary Gaitskill, for example. Or Alice Munro. (There is even a biography of Alice Munro that charts how much her stories overlap with her own life.) It is no coincidence that Gaitskill, Munro, and Díaz all write stories that are so innovative, heart-breaking, and thrilling that they dwarf those of their contemporaries. While it is hard for anyone to write a good story, and harder still to get that good story published, more often than not people who are marginalized have to perform at a higher level than the norm in any field, to overcome the bias that might otherwise count them out.

And to call Junot Díaz’s stories “love stories” seems a little tongue in cheek. They are more like unlove stories: they chronicle one Dominican American man’s inability to overcome the patriarchal expectations on himself, which he then turns on the women in his life, leading to eventual bleak and total emotional isolation. (Could Díaz be addressing those expectations of hypermasculinity; the ones that also make it hard for men of color to be seen as artists?)

Going on what Díaz admits about his personal life, the stories may be confessional, but they aren’t masturbatory or without purpose; instead they manage to maintain that almost impossible balance between beautiful writing, and politics. A quick read of stories like “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” “Alma,” or “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” might yield the belief that Díaz’s character, and Díaz himself, are pigs and misogynists. For sure, some readers I know can’t even get past Yunior’s addiction to ethnic and sexist slurs. While I don’t share the sentiment, I can sympathize with the desire to carve out a space in one’s life that is free from such language, as loaded, painful and constant as it is in our everyday lives.

But I have trouble understanding how a willing and careful reader could miss the fact that almost all of Díaz’s stories are cautionary tales about what happens to men who refuse to lay down their male power, in order to see women as human. When Nina Burleigh says, “Díaz’s alter ego is utterly beholden to his wandering penis, yet never examines his compulsion to bone everyone in sight,” I wonder if we were reading the same book. This is How You Lose Her’s biggest joke, and biggest tragedy is this: Yunior’s thesis is that he’s “not a bad guy,” and yet the tales he tells about himself are merciless in proving the opposite. Yunior may not “examine his compulsion[s]” but the stories do; unflinchingly. Yunior is a bad guy, and his refusal to take responsibility leads him to the worst ending of all by the book’s close: the inability to connect.

Because Díaz’s work is so concerned with masculinity, it is hard for me to imagine “the female Junot Díaz” — that woman writer who writes just like he does, but doesn’t receive the accolades he does. The fact that Díaz is so uniquely himself as a writer compounds this issue. Does the question work in reverse? Who is the male Mary Gaitskill? The male Alice Munro? (Chekhov, Cynthia Ozick says.) Zadie Smith and ZZ Packer seem like possible counterparts for Díaz — though their accolades are intact — for their blend of humor and tragedy and high and low culture, and their investigation of the impact that race, gender and class have on love and family.

For me, the magic of Junot Díaz is that his stories work on more levels than I can keep track of. The way he writes race and gender is radical, but what he does with words is so enchanting that a reader who doesn’t care about race and gender can still be swept away. Among the great gifts of his work is the common space it opens up. Michael Bourne wrote in September that Díaz lets all readers share in his space, whatever their background: “…no matter what racial madness was happening on the page, I as a white reader always felt included among his boys, the ‘you’ in his stories always seemed to include me.” While this is not the point Bourne is trying to make (and you should read his review because his point is more insightful and complex), Díaz’s writing does indeed put the bros at ease, because Díaz is simultaneously critical of machismo, while still being macho. And so conversations about race and gender with white writers or male writers that I would otherwise find stressful, risky, because I am a woman writer of color — especially if we’re talking about less bro-friendly writers like (God forbid) Alice Walker — miraculously become open and relaxed, if we’re talking about Yunior. Here Díaz gets to have his cake and eat it too, and that could be what annoys feminist writers. A woman would never get high fives for criticizing the patriarchy; that I can definitely agree with. But. Could I be irritated that we can’t have the same kind of relaxed conversations in the context of Louise Erdrich, Edwidge Danticat, or even Edward P. Jones, because they don’t make the bros feels as safe as Díaz? Sure. But I’m still wildly grateful for that space that fits both me and the literary bros. Seriously, that’s a magic trick and a half.

And yet, this common space can be dangerous, because it’s too easy. If I were to entertain the notion that something other than Díaz’s colossal talent is behind his success, I would guess that prize committees bequeath their approval on Díaz, because a bonus comes from association with him, outside of his cred as a writer.

Loving Díaz can be like slipping Kanye lyrics into conversation or cushioning racist comments with references to your black best friend: it allows white readers a reprieve from white guilt. A fantasy world opens up, where racial difference is elided, and you can be absolved of the crimes associated with white privilege by raving about Junot Díaz, or by giving him a big prize.

Sure, the cynicism behind this sentiment is as ugly as Burleigh’s crass dismissal of Díaz’s worth. But the fact of the matter is that neither my cynicism nor Burleigh’s misplaced anger is going to go away any time soon; not until the landscape of publishing shares more of the power, and lets in the people that it has shut out.

__*The total number of students in my program at any time was 80. The number 150 is a rough guess that includes any students who overlapped with me, and graduated before me, after me or with me.

Thea Lim
has written for Salon, The Guardian, Utne Reader, Bitch Magazine, Jezebel and others, and she has served on the editorial boards of Gulf Coast and Racialicious. She has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Houston, and you can follow her on Twitter: @thea_lim.

1.
Should we hop in the DeLorean and zip back to the neon spandex-n-matching-scrunchie year of 1989, where would I be on a radical Saturday night? Not painting my toenails lime green, Aqua Net-ing my hair or jamming out to the B52’s “Love Shack.” Oh no, I was too cool for that. I was babysitting.

I distinctly remember the swell of girlhood pride when one weekend a friend asked if I’d come over for dinner and then to a movie—the newest adventure of Marty McFly.

“Can’t,” I replied. “I have to babysit my neighbor’s daughter. She’s one of my regular clients and her mom always orders Domino’s.”

“Really?” My friend said and sighed with such pained jealousy I can still recall it to this day.

For me and a million other American preteens of the era, this entrepreneurial spirit was a direct result of an obsession with Ann M. Martin’sThe Baby-Sitters Club series. My childhood bookshelf was filled with BSC books—row upon row of colorful titles neatly aligned in numerical order. The novels and their characters ushered me through adolescence with money in my pocket, after school club meetings, a deep appreciation for a job well done, and the satisfaction of sharing it with friends. So inspiring were the novels that to this day the sight of block lettering gives me gleeful pangs of nostalgia.

My heart did an honest-to-goodness flip-flop in my chest, and my inner Claudia exclaimed, “Oh my Lord! A prequel!” I was so excited; I could barely Google fast enough, my brain spinning the question, “Is it true? Is it true?” I am here to testify: Folks, it’s gospel.

My original copies are boxed somewhere in my parents’ basement. I’ve made mental note to excavate them on my next visit. As for the prequel, it’s ordered and my trusted online bookseller promises its arrival in 8 to 10 days. So what if the target audience is 7 to 12 year olds. The BSC are classics alongside Nancy Drew, The Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, and so on. Okay, many will debate this claim, but on my shelf, the BSC are as beloved.

Allow me to school those who aren’t familiar: The BSC series enjoyed a stellar run from 1986 to 2000, amassing a fervent preteen readership that chomped through all 213 titles as fast as they chewed Bubble Tape gum. The Baby-Sitters Club membership grew from four to eight main characters over the course of its fourteen-year popularity streak, selling approximately 176 million copies. Like any cultural feeding frenzy, it spawned a number of spin-offs including extended versions, a mystery series, character autobiographies, The Baby-Sitter’s Little Sister, California Diaries, The Kids in Ms. Coleman’s Class, and graphic novels.

To Mokoto Rich of the New York Times, Scholastic’s Editorial Director David Levithanexplained that the publisher brought back the series because of fan requests. “This whole generation of girls who had grown up reading The Baby-Sitters Club were now teachers, librarians or mothers,” said Levithan. “And at any opportunity they had, they let us know they wanted them back. We couldn’t go to a convention without having women come up to us and say, ‘You’ve got to bring these books back.’ ”

2.
Again invoking the DeLorean, a typical conversation between my friends and me whilst braiding rainbow friendship bracelets on my bedroom floor went something like this:

Friend #3: “Well, I’m only on Hello Mallory and I can’t get over Stacey moving to New York.”

Me: “Yeah, that sucked. I bawled my eyes out when she left.”

Friends #1 and #2: “Totally.”

Me: “So do you guys have any babysitting jobs this weekend?”

As the daughter of a career Army officer, I moved every couple of years during my preteens. The BSC provided me with a group of friendly characters who remained intact, book after book, year after year, and most importantly, place after place. It seemed no matter where my family was stationed, I found other girls who shared this literary friendship. So despite not knowing a thing about each other, we could talk for hours about Kristy’s newest adventure, Mary Anne’s boy troubles, or our own babysitting stories. During its heyday, it seemed everyone on the planet was reading the BSC! (Or at least to a ten year old it did.)

These babysitting characters weren’t just make-believe heroines; they were role models. They dealt with responsibility, family problems, health issues, self-esteem, school, friendship, boys, etc. And we, preteens, read, learned, and took heart from their accomplishments and mistakes.

Given the current YA vampire and fantasy craze, I wonder if novels staked in the normal can find the ardent following they did with my generation. Even with the updates to technology, fashion and pop culture, will young readers with an acutely developed taste for bloody bites and wizard wands be captivated by the story of industrious teenagers facing the universal travails of growing up?

In her interview with the Wall Street Journal, author Ann M. Martin thinks so: “The issues the characters tackled twenty-five years ago are not really so different than the issues kids today tackle… what are the things that are most important to them still? Their families, friendships, issues surrounding school.”

I agree, and I think readers are growing somewhat worn out by the fantastical. Yes, unicorns, secret spells, hunky werewolves, and eternal life are delicious to dream on, but that’s not the world around the dinner table or in the classroom. Sorry to burst the bubble, but a family of vampires do not live next door nor is there a Platform 9¾. Reality is, the neighbors are worrying about the grocery bill and their preteen daughter’s plea for Miley Cyrus concert tickets. And trust me, if you run headlong into a magical, unseen platform, the best you’re going to get is the “transformative” feeling of a mild concussion.

I believe readers are now at a place where four regular girls facing normal problems might be the compelling connection desired from their reading fodder. In a 2010 American Psychological Association survey on stress in America, researchers found that children ages 8 to 17 suffer from more anxiety-induced headaches, sleeplessness and upset stomachs than they did in previous years. A few of their top worries included school, getting along with peers and their family’s finances. Everyday issues.

So while the fantasy genre is an exciting escape, when the book covers close, readers—young and old— must still contend with the microseisms within their homes, within their relationships. The trials and tribulations of being chased by a vengeful vampire can quickly pale in comparison to parent’s divorce, a sibling’s battle with diabetes, economic difficulties, peer rejection, fear of failure, and the secrets we carry, big and small.

I argue it’s time to bring back literary heroes and heroines with feet firmly planted in reality. The characters who battle the business of life. The characters in whom we see a reflection of ourselves. And I think Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia and Stacey are just the young, tenacious women to do it.

24 comments:

Brilliant–great piece, and so well articulated. Diaz’s stories are grappling with the issue being critiqued by Burleigh (of the way one man treats women, how that is harmful not only to the women but also to the man, people’s inability to but attempt at trying to empathize with others and failing). I don’t think Diaz is celebrating the simultaneous vulnerability and machismo (though that makes Yunior as a character very charismatic and seductive); he is, however, capturing what that experience is like, how it’s harmful to the self, to others. Just because someone’s a dick (and Yunior is, so many times) doesn’t mean they aren’t human. It’s pretty incredible that a writer can with subtlety and with such elegance capture a character as both an asshole and a human being; and for being so willing to reveal those flaws. It reminds me of Coetzee’s Disgrace, another book about an asshole the writer helps us understand (though the asshole in this case is not nearly as charming).

“Since 1917, a total of four men of color have won the Pulitzer: N. Scott Momaday, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward P. Jones, and Junot Díaz. Thirty women have won the Pulitzer, almost half of them condensed in the last 30 years, and three of those women were women of color.”

WHO?

“Since 1950 two men of color have won a National Book Award in Fiction (Ralph Ellison and Ha Jin), and 16 women have won an NBA, one of them a woman of color.”

WHO?

Yes, I know I can Google. (And I will.) But why not name the women of color, the same way the men are named, in the course of the text?

This article is fantastic. And I agree with Thea that Junot’s new collection is a cautionary tale of where the type of masculinity Yunior exhibits can lead, and I’d add that embedded in it, quite subtly, is the growth of Yunior towards seeing women as more than objects of his desire.

If people are interested in what Junot Diaz has to say about these accusations of misogyny in his work, and about the objectification of women in general, we talked a lot about this in my recent radio interview of him:

Erica Jong is not a writer I take seriously. Why? Because her work is purely confessional. And it fails to pay attention to the things literary novels do that make me read them: the sacred, the mysterious, ambiguity, moral perplexity, to name just a few. Diaz’s work takes on these parts of the human experience. I think he’s a master prose stylist, but I think his moral universe is less well-developed than it might get to be when he’s older.

meh … all this scorekeeping is really tiresome, and your engagement with it is even more tedious. yes, race and class and gender are notable, but if those are the central elements of one biography, well, good luck with that. when you step away from the – what, identity politics of all this, and talk about why you like his writing, I became engaged in your essay. but only a little bit. being a man of “color” I’m so bored with this need to essentialize every f’ing person because of what they “are.” always, every writer who “tackles” this topic loses – you like a writer, or you don’t, and I think you do more to maintain the status quo by continuing this Roxanne Gay et all line of attack. it’s identity politics plus watered down semiotics & it ends up making the essayist sound not so much utopian, but an adult yearning for kindergarten. fair? in what world do you live that the world has ever been “fair”? grow up. some people make it, some people don’t, and approaching this from that place – oh never mind.

I’m no fan of Diaz, so I can’t speak to the experience of reading him. But I am a fan of Kanye, and I can say that in some of his highly particular message there is something universal and not at all escapist. When he raps about his aspirations as a rapper, having nervous breakdowns about failure, doubting his ability early in his career (Touch the Sky), this isn’t enjoyable because I can pretend racial differences are elided, or because I want to be a rapper or producer or even be in the music industry. I enjoy it because I understand the universality of aspirations and doubt, regardless of race of profession.

I’m not sure if the same applies to Diaz, so this could be wildly off topic, but I suspect that some of his masculinity writing does convey universal stuff, albeit in a highly specific way. (And as I wrote that, I thought about the lyrics of Drake…)

I see what you’re saying, and my intention wasn’t to suggest that white listeners like Kanye solely because they believe it will make them less racist. Nor was I suggesting that either Diaz or Kanye don’t have actual talent or an ability to synthesize experience in a way that appeals to many different readers/listeners (I myself am partial to “Spaceship” from College Dropout). Or that friendships between black people and non-black people are never based in true affection.

I was more referring to a kind of fandom (not all Diaz or Kanye fandom), where people are fans just to be fans – it’s about advertising that you like the writer/rapper because you desire the associations that come with that fandom. It becomes less about connecting or appreciating the art, and more about advertising yourself as the kind of person who is into that kind of thing. It’s about self-aggrandizement, and when you mix in race, then it becomes about trying to be “unracist,” by association.

I do think there is the potential for individuals to tokenize, as well as critics, especially with social media and everything; everyone has a bullhorn now. But I also think that it’s a phenomenon that predates that technology, that even within the dynamic of a small circle of friends such a thing can happen. Which is to say, that it’s something for both large organizations and individuals to think about and question.

Righteous. Right on. Thanks for the clarity. I just heard Junot Diaz speak, and I built a pedestal for him because the force of his pro-feminist (overt) politics were so deeply moving and matched what I picked up (implicitly) in this new book. You are right, he gets to have his cake and eat it too. And we women of color feminists should be annoyed by that.

As a woman of color, I frankly agree with Nina Burleigh’s assessment of Junot Diaz. He may, at times, write well but style does not overcome content for me (although in a beauty obsessed society which degrades women if they aren’t picture perfect, this may be a reason why Diaz is so appreciated).

Junot Diaz is a crass writer who writes as literature his fantasies about boning and beating and destroying women. I’m surprised that Megan Fox hasn’t made an appearance.

Shame on the writer of this articles for not dealing with the misogyny in the text, where there is so much that academics could write several books, but rather on generalities and how some colored man needs to be awarded so might as well be Junot Diaz, the perpetuator of stereotypes and gender inequality.

Well said. I mostly agreed with it. I have one comment. The “man of color” thing seems to be an expression that is misused, overused or misplaced to me as a person born and raised in the Netherlands. I understand that Junot Diaz is Latin, an expression for an ethnic group that we do not really have in Europe. Closest comaprisonin that side of the world would be is we were calling ethnic Italians and Spanish “people of color”, or non white, as that is inferred by “color” , I take it. They would be outraged and as a matter of fact, I am stunned as well by the north American need to classify people by an indication of their shade of skin, or hair, or what have you. If Diaz is an immigrant, like I am, call him an immigrant, or a former Dominican citizen, or whatever. It is crazy to keep referring to people by their shade of skin. In any case, his skin looks pretty white to me, so I would not ever call him a person of color regardless.

The bottom line is, racism is a life and kicking, and it affects men and women. Good for Diaz for writing a book that tells his, to many readers, shocking truth.

The final scene of Erica Jong’sFear of Flying takes place in the bath. Heroine Isadora soaks in the tub and contemplates herself in the water: “The pink V of my thighs, the triangle of curly hair, the Tampax string fishing the water like a Hemingway hero, the white belly, the breasts half floating, the nipples flushed and rosy from the steamy water.” She’s waiting for her estranged husband, but when he enters the scene, it suddenly cuts short — the novel’s final sentences are, “I hummed and rinsed my hair. As I was soaping it again, Bennett walked in.”

It’s a distinctly abrupt note to end the novel, but appropriate for a book that takes place largely inside the protagonist’s head. Isadora is an authorial avatar to whom the term “thinly veiled” hardly applies. Her biography mirrors Jong’s almost exactly, and there are moments when the book reads as more memoir than novel. Isadora’s narration is highly introspective, rarely stepping beyond the boundaries of the self. (One chapter is literally written as a movie in which she is the star.) A 1973 review in the New York Times saw this as grounds for critique: “There is some great humor…but often Isadora’s condescension and self-consciousness reduce the experience for the reader.” Too much self; not enough other.

Nonetheless, Jong’s personal writing has political roots. It’s possible to situate Fear of Flying within a tradition of women’s “self-centered” writing, arguably beginning with postwar writers who recast the domestic sphere as the site of of violence, ennui, and dark beauty. “What is so real as the cry of a child?” asked Sylvia Plath in her poem “Kindness,” featured in Ariel. “A rabbit’s cry may be wilder/But it has no soul.” A generation later Fear of Flying focused similarly on the intimacy of inner life, but infused it with an unapologetic, cheerfully bawdy tone that broke new ground for women writers to explore this intimacy in their own work.

While Fear of Flying rode the crest of a second wave of feminism explicitly focused on politicizing the fabric of the everyday, the genre of self-reflective writing that it helped to spawn still endures, if remaining largely specific to white women of the middle class and above. (Reflecting on the inner self is a luxury afforded to those whose outer shells are relatively secure: those who do not struggle to earn enough to eat; who do not bring up children on meagre incomes; who do not occupy bodies that are sites of increasingly explicit warfare.) Even from my vantage point onto the relatively small Australian literary scene, women’s “confessional writing” is the subject of much attention, meriting a recent piece in Overland, and critiques from writers Kath Kenny and Helen Razer. It’s the familiar battleground: is the personal always political? Does a protagonist that reflects the author’s image signify a novel that is little more than a mirror? Does this kind of writing give the reader too much self, and not enough other? But in the act of reading, distinctions between self and other are rarely so clear-cut, and self-centered writing can blur these boundaries in strange and surprising ways. Taking the question of the self seriously can, in fact, open the way to a reflective reading experience far broader in scope than generally first assumed. Here, Fear of Flying still has radical lessons to offer.

Although there is a tendency to focus on the inherent literary merits (or lack thereof) of self-centered writing, we might do better to begin with the words on paper. What does it sound like, the voice of the self speaking back to the self? Isadora’s narrative style is distinctively frank and unpretentious. Sentences in Fear of Flying are noticeably short, and often connected by dashes, as if the writer simply needed to get words on paper. And indeed, this may be close to the truth: Erica Jong recalls writing her debut novel in “a mad rush, heart racing, adrenaline pumping, wanting to tell the truth about women whatever it cost me”.

So Fear of Flying was written as a crazed dash across an empty sky, the author the sole pilot of a plane with no destination. In this, the medium reflects the message — the plot of the novel revolves around a zigzagging existentialist road trip through Europe, where the only plan is to keep going. Present on this doomed trip: Isadora and flirtatious Langian Adrian Goodlove (Jong’s winking appreciation of the eighteenth-century novel is clear) whom she met at a psychoanalytic conference in Vienna. Not present: Isadora’s “perfectly nice husband” Bennett, a stable but emotionally stunted Freudian, left behind in Vienna. The love triangle acts as the book’s driving narrative force, but it’s an illusion, a flimsy paper backdrop to a much deeper drama. Adrian and Bennett are only convenient puppets fighting out the familiar conflict at Isadora’s core: security versus adventure. Death-drive versus life-force. Fear versus flying. Five years into her increasingly distant marriage, Isadora eventually finds it too hard to resist Adrian’s proposal to take off together in his battered Triumph: “I’ll discover Europe,” he tells her. “You’ll discover yourself.”

If Adrian does discover Europe, we don’t see it. Very little of the actual trip is featured in the novel; rather, their hours of driving serve for endless introspection on Isadora’s part. We travel deep down into Isadora’s childhood, her adolescence, her family history, her marriages, her struggles with writing, with Jewishness, with her husband, with herself. What sort of woman does she want to be? Her mother and sisters pressure her to “stop writing and have a baby,” but as she asks:

Why did they have to keep rushing me and trying to cram me into the same molds that had made them so unhappy?…I had published a book which even I could still stand to read. Six years of writing and discarding, writing and changing, trying to get deeper and deeper into myself…But to my family I was a failure because I had no children.

To have a child is to split and release the self in strange and terrifying ways, a prospect toward which Isadora is ambivalent. (“If I have a baby I want it to be all mine,” she says, surely recognizing the impossibility of this wish even as she gives voice to it. “A girl like me, but better.”) For now, she chooses self-containment, self-knowledge: a quest to go ever deeper. Through her work, she reproduces herself on her own terms. But she’s consumed by the hypocrisy of writing fearlessly while living cowed — hence her strange, compulsive attraction toward disastrous (but adventurous) Adrian. “No bored housewife, I,” she tells herself in that first glorious moment when the Triumph roars off and leaves Bennett behind. “I was flying.”

But liberation at the hands of someone else can only take you so far. The contradiction comes to a head when Isadora — abandoned by Adrian in Paris — is forced for the first time to cultivate survival on her own. It’s tempting to read the process of her transformation as rather too neat: gripped by anxiety in a seedy Paris hotel room, Isadora finds her journal and begins to read. “I am going to figure out how I got here,” she says to herself. Reading through the record of her life, she grows calm and philosophical. She loses her fear — and without fear, flying doesn’t hold quite the same appeal. It lacks the adrenaline of disaster, the danger that Isadora courts as an answer to “the restlessness, the hunger, the thump in the gut, the thump in the cunt, the longing to be filled up…” By the final pages, she’s confident in her assertion that “whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I’d go on working …”

After hundreds of pages of neurotic dithering, Isadora’s sudden flipped switch into maturity is jarring. That’s it? Just read an old journal and you’re cured? It was the one part of the book that always felt unsatisfying — perhaps because, in a novel otherwise wedged so tightly into its own time and space, the use of metaphor was at first unrecognizable. The reality of the scene was probably not a journal, and it was probably not a night in a hotel room in Paris — but the essence remains the same: to know oneself is to free oneself. We think of being “self-centered” as a different quality to being centered in oneself, but Isadora — staring into her handwritten mirror in a hotel room on the Rue de la Harpe — invites us to question the distinction.

The metaphor can be taken further – Jong hints at it when she writes that Isadora, reading her notebook, “began to be drawn into it as into a novel”. After the book’s publication, women wrote to Erica Jong to tell her that they were just like Isadora, or that Isadora was just like them. In How to Save Your Own Life, the 1977 sequel to Fear of Flying, Isadora (coincidentally now the best-selling author of a famously racy novel) receives fan letters along the lines of:
Youre Main Character (which is also you I believe) is exactly like me in all respects although Jewish … The problem is I have three children (they are loveley kids 3, 6 and 8) my husband is very jealouse and there is no way for me to go away like you did and get Adventure or Sex or even have time to think about my Development as a Human Being and Woman … My husband told me I better not read [your book] or else he would beat the shit out of me but I read it anyway!!
Isadora could not solve her readers’ problems, but she nonetheless changed their lives — not (necessarily) by inspiring them to have ill-considered affairs, but by encouraging them to reach past the bulky cushioning of domestic life and probe the contours of their own souls. A radical task in 1973, and even today — as the continuing furore over women’s self-reflective writing demonstrates. If selfishness is a literary crime, it’s also a social one – and women, especially, are vulnerable to accusation. Private lives are ‘women’s business’, but the minutiae of these inner lives — the joys and frustrations, the strangeness, the struggles, the fantasies, and the fears — are deemed unserious, selfish, when brought out into the light. Isadora’s fundamental crime in life, as in literature, is to look too much inward, and to regard this introspection as insight.

But insight works in mysterious ways. It’s not necessarily a lightning-bolt of pure knowledge from the author to the reader. I was a teenager when I first read Fear of Flying, and much of it went over my head, but I remember the feeling of relief, of grasping a hand in the darkness: Here is someone. My copy of the book had been my mother’s, but by the time I chanced across it, she was already three years dead and I was unpacking boxes in a country she’d never set foot in. I was lonely then in a drifting, aimless way; later, when I started school, my loneliness magnified and grew teeth. Perhaps more than many adolescents, I felt ill at ease inside myself, bumping into the awkward contours of my new life.

It was no coincidence that the book which became a shield against all this — the book that I read obsessively and carried around with me everywhere — was Fear of Flying. I came across it when I most needed myself, because I had no one else. The self is, after all, a tricky thing: looking too hard in the mirror might reveal things we’d rather not see. “I want to teach you not to be afraid of what’s inside you,” Adrian tells Isadora. But really it was Isadora — self-obsessed, unliterary Isadora — who offered her readers that gift. “You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul,” she reflects near the end of the book. “When all was said and done, it was all you had.” Fear of Flying made space for the self, took the self seriously, and this allowed many readers an experience that went far beyond the myopic contemplation of Isadora. It’s a lesson worth considering, as the debate over so-called ‘selfish’ writing continues: introspection can be a strength all its own, and reading has the power to place you within your own life as well as within another’s. As Isadora showed me, along with countless other readers: the self can be a lifeline, a raft, a wing to fly on.

I learned smells from books, which made me think they were fictional. When real people said That stinks, or I can smell the sea from here, I thought they were faking, that they were willing to pretend those smells existed beyond the page. I only discovered the word for people like me a few years ago. We are anosmic; we have anosmia: lack of the sense of smell.